Fanfiction on The Book of NegroesSomeone Knowns My Name
by RebekahMk2
Summary: After race riots break out in Nova Scotia, May's mother leaves her in the care of the Witherspoons while she goes to check on her friends. But when Ma still does not return for three days, the Witherspoons are forced to flee Nova Scotia for their lives, bringing May with them. This is the story of what happened in the 17 years that May was separated from her mother.


I could always remember my ma clearly: her shiny black curls of hair that she loved to tie red scarves into, her soft, lulling voice that put me to sleep so many times, and above all, her passion for words - how she imprinted into me the desire to learn and teach. For years, every night when I went to bed, I tried to imagine her in my mind so that I never let the truth get to me: _she abandoned me. She didn't want me._

She was an African, I was told, with moons on her cheeks and a free spirit about her. She taught slaves and ex-slaves how to read and write in the churches, and she did a whole lot of good, so I've heard. These stories made it impossible to believe that she was a bad woman; a woman who would abandon her own child.

We left Shelburne when I was three years old, though my memory of my early childhood has grown quite foggy. A quick stopover in Boston then led us to London, England - a safe place for a pair of white loyalists such as the Witherspoons. My tantrums of wailing for my mother tormented the Witherspoons as we crossed the ocean and moved into the bustling city. Mrs. Witherspoon - Alverna was her first name - was a gentle woman by nature. Indeed, she made cookies for me and sung me to sleep at night, but she was no substitute for my true mother.

Shelburne was in chaos when we left it. I often surprise myself at how much I remember about that era of my life. I saw a man die; beaten to death on the street during the riots that occurred before I was taken away. My ma thought I could not see what was happening, as she tucked me between two stores, but I saw everything and it haunts me to this day. After that incident, she took me to the Witherspoons and asked them to care for me for a few days while she went to see if her friends over in Birchtown were safe.

Ma did not come back. Some rioters saw her leaving the house that day and began to lash out against the Witherspoons. I shall never forget how terrified I was on that day at that realization that I only had two options: to flee Shelburne and live, or stay and wait for Ma and risk death. The choice was not mine to make.

The Witherspoons admired my ma - I am sure of that - but their lives were far more important. I imagine that Mrs. Witherspoon was caught in a rut, unsure whether it would be more cruel to separate a girl from her mother, or let the girl be killed. All I could do was pray that Ma would be alright. I had no idea what to think: would she really abandon me, or did she have some other reason for not returning? I left my heart in the harbour of Shelburne, Nova Scotia, dreaming that one day, I would return and be reunited with my beloved mother, the only family I had.

The years I spent in England were a blur. The Witherspoons had made arrangements to live in the large city of London. Mr. Witherspoon's mother lived there, as well as some of his brothers and sisters, so it was an ideal choice of residence. We moved into a pristine little cottage on the outskirts of the city. It was not much, but it did us well at the time.

I quite liked London. It was such a hive of activity; with people coming and going like the busy little ants I would poke with a stick when I was tiny. And the milling job that Mr. Witherspoon acquired was a step down from his middle-class status in Nova Scotia, yet it brought in enough money to pay rent for our cottage and feed us well every winter.

Though the other stores nearby were insignificant to a young girl such as myself, my favourite store of them all was the candy store two roads over. A widower owned the store, living alone above it with his daughter, Myrtle. Myrtle was my age, so whenever Alverna gave me a penny to bring home some licorice sticks, I always made sure to say hello to Myrtle and let her show me her new dolls or any other marvel she had acquired. Thinking back on it, Myrtle was my only friend. I wonder where she is today.

Despite the more relaxed attitude of the English towards blacks (as slavery was not acceptable there), townsfolk found it most peculiar for a white loyalist family to raise an African child as their own. At that time, I found it insignificant that my skin was the colour of the coffee that my adoptive father would drink in the morning, whereas he and Alverna were pale as the moon, or that my nose was a little wider and my hair a little wilder. It should have been insignificant, but inevitably, the town got to talking about us, firing shots with their gossiping tongues.

At first, the gossip of our neighbours never bothered the Witherspoons, but one particular incident with the extended family (and I may never know what that was, for I was not there) was the final straw. Alverna came home from a visit with her mother-in-law visibly distressed. It was February.

"Na, what troubles you?" I asked her. I was about six years old at the time, as it had been three years since we fled Nova Scotia.

She looked right past me, and strolled over to look out the window without saying a word. Since we came here, her soft, supple skin had turned papery and she had become quite thin - likely because she pined for her homeland. Her billowy yellow cotton dress rippled as a salty ocean breeze swept through the cottage. I remember this moment clearly.

Without answering me directly, she replied, "My darling, there are going to have to be some changes around here."

"What kind of changes?" I shifted uncomfortably.

Tears were appearing in her crystalline blue eyes. This made me rather nervous. Alverna hardly ever cried, as she was mostly a woman of good cheer.

"May, my dear May…" her voice trailed off as she sought to compose herself.

Alverna sat down at our kitchen table and looked me in the eyes.

"May," she began again, coldly this time, "there are going to be some changes. It is not proper for us to treat you as our daughter. You are not our daughter; you are merely the abandoned child of our servant. Therefore, you must inherit her position in this family. From now on, you shall never be May Witherspoon. You are May, our servant girl, and nothing more than that."

The words stung in my immature ears. I had known for a long time that my fate was inevitable, but always assumed that the Witherspoons were different; better people than the rest of them; not caring about my ancestry.

"But I am no servant, Na!"

"You were born to be a servant!"

I began to cry. Alverna hardly ever raised her voice to me. I wept for my pathetic life, my delusional thinking that I could be to them as Myrtle was to her father. But most of all, I wept for my mother, who left me with these people and never came back for me.

At the age of six, a child should be playing and learning; discovering her world and making new friends. At the age of six, I became the sole servant of the Witherspoon household. As my many toys began to break with age, they were never replaced. As my elegant little dresses wore out, I was given plain maid outfits. Less and less was I given a penny for licorice. It was humiliating to serve tea to people I once considered family. The Witherspoon stopped taking me with them to church or the park, or anywhere, really.

Sometimes I thought I saw a tinge of guilt in Alverna's soft eyes, but whatever Grandmother Witherspoon had told her on that day in February had changed her.

At the age of eight, I began plotting my escape. A few doors down moved in a well-off family with three black servants. One was in her thirties, I presume, and she seemed to take a liking to me from the day she laid eyes on me. Her name was Charlotte, after the queen, and she was born and raised here in England. Whenever I had a little spare time, I would run over to the backdoor of the pretty red-brick house and call out for Charlotte. If she was not too busy, she would come outside and sit with me, and we'd talk about our days or whatever she had read in the newspaper.

Ah, the newspaper, my saviour. I was intrigued that Charlotte could simply glance over the white pages of the big piece of paper and tell me stories about what was happening far and wide throughout the world.

"My ma, she used to help print newspapers," I told her one day.

"You haven't spoken much about your ma, girl. I haven't met her, have I?" she replied gently.

"No, you haven't. My ma isn't here in England. The Witherspoons took me from her when we left Nova Scotia. But I remember her and I loved her and miss her very much."

"I see."

"She would let me help her put the printing blocks in the right places on the printing press. And she'd try to teach me to read, words like 'cat' or 'cake'. It was such fun."

"How fascinating that would be!"

"Oh, it was! But I never fully learned to read - only those little wee words. I try to read the books on the Witherspoons' shelf but I only recognize words here and there. I would love, love one day to read and write words like "magnificent" or "impeccable" and the like."

"Reading and writing are valuable skills to have, girl. If you are good enough at them, you might even become a teacher. My own dear mother was a schoolteacher. She helped many children learn those skills and I like to think that she changed their lives for the better. A rewarding line of work, teaching is. Yes, I am grateful every day that she was able to teach me such things before she passed on, bless her soul."

"My ma was a teacher too. She taught people to read and write at the church."

"There, so it must be destiny! I have an idea for you, and I think it will work nicely."

And then Charlotte went on to make a deal with me, that she would teach me how to read properly in exchange for my company, as she was a bit lonely in the big house because the other two servants were much younger than her and they didn't all get along.

Of course, although Charlotte's employers didn't mind if she helped me an hour a day, since they were good people, the Witherspoons were getting rather curious about my disappearing down the road whenever I finished serving tea and doing my chores. So I lied to them, saying that Charlotte was teaching me how to cook so that I could make better treats for them. Alverna, a lover of all fine chocolate desserts, was quite agreeable to that idea.

My plan was simple: Charlotte would teach me until I was most excellent at reading and writing, then I would pack my humble belongings in a sack and run away from the Witherspoons in the dark of night; I would run to a church that Charlotte had told me about where a preacher man would always let runaways stay, and then I would find a job teaching people to be literate.

It took a lot of planning on my part, but I finally managed to pull it off, one rainy night in June when I had just turned ten years old. Part of me had always hoped that my ma would remember me and come to England to find me (if she knew I had gone to England at all) and take me home and we would be happy together, but I knew at that moment that that was a silly idea; it would never happen.

I abandoned all thoughts of my ma's return, and bravely folded my dresses that night and slid them into the sack. The Witherspoons were fast asleep upstairs, while my room adjacent to the kitchen was downstairs, so I hoped they would not hear me. I emptied the contents of the cupboards into my sack as well, except for the bags of flour and barrels of salt pork which were definitely too heavy to carry. I had originally planned to go by foot across the city, a journey that would take several hours, but when I saw the black horse quietly munching grain in the barn beside the cottage, I decided to take the risk.

The Witherspoons had a barn of four horses. There were the two draft horses; big cream-coloured beasts who we used to pull loads, or sometimes rented out. And then there were the two saddle horses, Emelia and Coal, belonging to Mrs. and Mr. Witherspoon, respectively. While Emelia was just a general-purpose gray mare, Coal was a valuable horse, and one could tell just by looking at his sleek, dark coat and powerful-looking form. He was a treasure to Mr. Witherspoon, and I found his logic to be ridiculous. Coal and I, we were both the same colour, though I a human and he a horse, yet somehow Coal was much more precious.

I chose to use Coal for my escape because of the pain it would cause to his owner, which I later felt terrible about. I planned to sell Coal to a horse trader about midway through my journey to the church in order to get some money to sustain myself, but on my way there, I intended to ride him since he was a pleasant ride. And so, I bridled him and climbed aboard, sack and all, and we trotted off into the darkness. Mr. Witherspoon would probably suspect my taking him, so before I left, I led Emelia into the neighbour's horse pen, hoping to throw him off my trail. I felt surprisingly calm that night. The sound of Coal's clacking hooves on the cold cobblestone was rather soothing, as well as his gentle breathing.

London was at rest. We clattered through the night, sneaking through alleys and riding past open windows. I was heading to a place where I could be free and accepted.

When the sky started turning a light shade of purple, I found a stableboy to sell Coal to for a handful of shillings, far less than what Coal was worth but enough to buy the supplies I would need later on. The boy was delighted, and I knew that the horse would be well cared for. Selling Coal for what he was worth would be suspicious anyways: it would seemingly call out, "Runaway servant girl and horse thief!" to everyone.

From there, I walked the rest of the way, never stopping once to catch my breath or put down my sack for a moment. London was waking up. Vendors hustled into the streets, which were becoming cluttered with horses and carts. Charlotte had written my destination and some instructions to get there on a small piece of paper that I had tucked in the pocket of my blue dress. My reading skills had improved dramatically. I wished I could tell my ma, "Look! Look how your daughter can read like you!" and she could say, "What an intelligent girl I have."

At the time time, I felt so very independent. Despite my tiredness, I could not help but throw a little skip into my stride every so often, because I was far away from the Witherspoons and never coming back.

It was midday by the time I found myself standing in front of a small white church exhausted. I just stood there for a little while, catching my breath, then I slowly creeped up to the imposing door and rapped it with my childish knuckle. I heard footsteps inside and suddenly the door swung upon and I was greeted with a jolly man who looked friendly enough.

"Oh, I think I know who this is," he proclaimed proudly, "Are you young May, Charlotte's little friend?"

I nodded.

"You've had quite a night, haven't you? Such a brave girl. Come in, my wife and I live upstairs. We have a room ready for you." A petite woman poked her head into view.

"Thank you sir."

"Call me Charlie, please. And my wife, she's Maggie. None of that 'sir' or 'ma'am' nonsense to us."

"Thank you, sir Charlie…"

Since I was only ten, my dreams of paving my own way teaching was postponed, to my dismay, but the preacher and his wife had other plans for me. They arranged for me to go to school in the neighbourhood, where I met many friends whom I am still in contact with today. Charlie and Maggie were more like grandparents than anything to me, as I quickly found. Yes, I was truly happy for the first time since leaving my hometown.

When I graduated from school several years later, I was finally able to start teaching. I felt like I was my ma's legacy. And I came to terms with the loss of my ma, convincing myself that she was likely dead and forgotten. _Perhaps one day,_ I thought, _I can go back to Shelburne and look through the graveyards, and maybe I can give myself some closure if I can just place a handful of daisies on her grave._ I tried not to consider the fact that her name had slipped from my mind when I was tiny, and only her words and image stayed with me. I told myself that I would remember her name when I arrived in Nova Scotia, and if I remember her name, I could find her grave.

My students gave me such delight. Our classes were not just sessions of learning; they were also sessions of storytelling. Ma used to tell me that storytelling is an African tradition. In every village, there was one storyteller who learned and passed along stories through the generations. I suppose we have stuck well to that tradition over the years. In my small classes of adults who wanted to change their own lives by becoming literate, I heard stories of escape from slavery and voyages across the ocean, stories of abuse and stories of prevailing hope.

Sometimes we would read the newspaper as well, just as Charlotte had done with me as a girl. Those were the stories of the world and what was happening in it. We closely followed the news regarding efforts to abolish the slave trade. We all prayed at night for our brothers who were impacted by such evils, and wanted nothing more than for it to end. We felt so fortunate, above all, to have safe lives nestled in our neighbourhood of London in a country without slavery.

But one day, the reading of the newspaper gave me an unthinkable shock. Mary was a woman in my reading class; a large woman with a hearty voice who loved to laugh. Like Charlotte, she had always lived in England and worked as a lady's maid for many years. After quitting and coming to us, she sought to find better employment by learning to read and write, and perhaps become a bookkeeper or secretary or the like.

Mary was reading an article about an African woman who was relating in court her experiences within the slave trade, working closely with the Abolitionists to end the slave trade. I had heard similar stories, and I admired the courage of those women and men so bold to speak up for their people. What caught me off guard, thought, was when Mary asked me how to pronounce the woman's name. My eyes flew casually across the page, but stopped when they reached the name: Aminata. Aminata Diallo. I knew it when I saw it.

Meena, they used to call her. Very few people could properly pronounce her African name, so they just called her Meena. Maybe that's why I had forgotten her name. But at that moment, I finally remembered.

Mary later told me that I had had a queasy look about me before I fell to the floor. She told me that I had awoken with a determined look about me. And I can only imagine how much I glowed when I spotted the aged yet familiar face standing regally in front of the crowd some months later: Aminata Diallo, my mother. And I shall never forget her name.


End file.
